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137 Chapter 5 The Transformation of Post–Civil Rights Politics: Race, Religion, Class, and Culture [My father got transferred to New Orleans when I was in middle school.] I went to public school. The school I was in was racially mixed, and I had some very wonderful black friends. I’ll never forget being yanked out of school one day. They came and pulled us out of school. [Who’s “they”?] Administrators. And they said we had to go to another school because of this policy, and I had to be bused, like twenty-five miles to school. . . . I had to catch a bus at six in the morning and didn’t get home until after dark. So that was the first government thing that affected my life. I was a fifthgrader . It was pretty horrible. [How did your parents respond to that?] They didn’t understand why. . . . I think they realized at once that we were exhausted , we couldn’t do our work well. My dad left that job. We didn’t make our year down there. . . . We moved back to New Jersey. —A homemaker from New Jersey (C002 NJ F MC) T he civil rights movement disrupted the institutional patterns by which whites lived their lives. Although busing induced perhaps more resistance than other civil rights policies, any policies that affected white lives were resisted, and not only by those directly affected . Despite the general acceptance of the principles of civil rights that eventually emerged in the country, the efforts of the federal government to implement programs and policies to support both the legislation and the growing court enforcement of civil rights led to the mobilization of political opposition that affected the political commitment, loyalty, identity, and behavior of various segments of the white population. In this chapter, I try to sort out the arguments set forth, both historically and for the present, to explain the transformation of party politics that resulted from the civil rights movement. I try to provide a context to understand the party competition for various groups of white voters, especially the white working class, evangelical Christians, professionals, DiTomaso.indb 137 12/12/2012 7:28:54 AM 138 The American Non-Dilemma and independents. These groups are all represented by the sociopolitical groups in this study. In subsequent chapters, I discuss the views of the interviewee groups with regard to various policy issues. Seeing these responses within the larger context of political change in the country, I believe , makes it easier to address Myrdal’s (1944) expectation that whites would undertake political change to eliminate racial inequality because of the moral dilemma they would face. In this chapter, I examine the role of race in the creation of party coalitions , both before and after the civil rights movement, that led to the current parity between the two major parties nationally.1 The parties’ competition for the white vote has been the center of their efforts to re-create a winning and, they hope, majority coalition. Controversies over the interpretation of these changes have been both animated and challenging. As both Democrats and Republicans have faced difficulties in holding together a winning coalition of voters, they have also faced internal competition between party activists and moderates—in the Republican Party between conservative activists and moderates and in the Democratic Party between liberal activists and moderates. Providing an analysis of the larger political context should help make the content of the interviews more understandable and help explain specifically how the structural circumstances of different groups of interviewees led to their political attitudes and behavior with regard to inequality. The racial underpinnings of contemporary Politics Black Voting Rights and Party Realignment In the competition between political parties, race has not always been the central concern, but it has always been a defining issue in terms of how the parties organize winning coalitions at various levels of government (Frymer 1999). It has long been a strategy in U.S. politics to hide or suppress issues related to race in order to maintain a coalition around economic or social issues. For example, in the early part of the nineteenth century Martin Van Buren succeeded in building a national Democratic Party that could address critical economic issues by avoiding the differences between the North and the South over the issue of slavery. In doing so, Van Buren was instrumental in creating rules for adopting the party’s platform that required support from both the North and the South. The...

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